Through a real life incident, Amrit Raj, a young yoga guru, based in Rishikesh, tells us how you can apply yoga teachings to real, practical life and master your mind to conquer fear.
With a bit of practice, yoga comes easy. The body is flexible and it is quite easy to execute some quick asanas and breathing exercises while on the mat. The trouble begins when you try incorporating those integrated yoga teachings―of discipline, routine, focus and meditation, besides pranayama and asanas―off the mat as well.
With this theme in mind, I asked Yogi Amrit Raj, a young ayurvedacharya and yoga guru-about-town from Rishikesh, on how one can apply yoga teachings to real, practical life.
“Positivity, creativity, smiles―that’s what you need to introduce into your life,” says the smiling Amrit Raj. “Just as we eat food, sleep and give rest to the body, we need to do something regularly for our mind as well,” he reiterates. “So, focus on giving nourishment to the mind and work constantly on getting rid of the mind’s many impurities that always show up as complaints, doubts, anger, fear, anxiety, negativity. And you can do this with practise of yoga and ayurveda.”
He recounts an interesting incident on how he once found himself in a terribly sticky situation, and used mind yoga to get out of it. He was at a workshop addressing healers learning yoga and ayurveda in California, when he stated, quite matter-of-factly, that when you live life in the clean, pure lane with yoga and ayurveda, you will have no fears in life, in any situation.
A young yoga enthusiast at the workshop got up and said, ”No fear, Yogi? Then come skydiving with us this Sunday.”
Sixty people were waiting for Yogi Amrit Raj’s answer.
“I had to say ‘yes’! But internally, I was dying with fear,” he confesses. For, hadn’t he just given the 60-strong audience advice that practising yoga gives you the assurance of ‘no fear in life’?
That casual ‘yes’ activated butterflies in his stomach and they created mayhem over the next few days, with nights spent tossing and turning with fear and worry. “I watched videos on skydiving; and was elated one moment, and depressed the next. At least one in every 10 videos highlighted some accident or the other in skydiving. Here I was a simple lad who hadn’t ever been on a Ferris wheel, and I was going skydiving? No, no, no…I can’t do it,” he rationalised to himself.
“The mind had begun to play tricks. It would give me a rational answer and sit quiet for 20 minutes and then go jumping off again,” he elaborated. “I would rationalise and tell the mind to stop chattering and it would stop for the next 20 minutes. And then it would start again…and so on and on, it went.”
Finally, the fateful Monday arrived when he was to join the skydiving crowd. “The butterflies in my stomach now had the company of jumping monkeys! My hands were shaking as I filled in the consent forms. Words jumped out at me from the form, especially lines which read: ‘of my own accord, my own responsibility, no liabilities of the organisers…claims…insurance’. Oops, what had I let myself into? I decided not to jump. I will just watch, I told myself.”
“But by now, the girl at the desk was asking me to pay $300 for the jump and $100 for a video photographer to accompany me and shoot the video, while I was jumping. I paid up, but I was numb.”
“I was now in the plane, in the harness, hooks and all, thinking of how much I loved my mama, my papa. I was in the queue for the jump…Just then, a thought came to my mind: Why not close my eyes and meditate. And I said to myself, what’s the fear here? It is safe, I am taking precautions, so why the doubts?”
I told my mind, “Let’s just do it.”
That’s the simple signal the mind had been waiting for…and I did it!
So, programme your mind the way you want it to act. Give it auto-suggestions.
Go ahead, and just do what you have to do.
For, it is the mind that rules the body and not the other way round. And where the mind rules, there is no fear.
